My story starts in 2005, when I was 6. There’s not much to remember before then. Other than the fact my Dad and I lived with in my Grandma’s house, along with my uncle and my grandpa’s brother. My grandpa had passed away earlier that year, and the rest of the family I knew then were either heavy into hard drugs, or alcohol, or even both.
The story really starts when the house was raided by a task force in the middle of the night. My Dad and I shared a bunk bed in one of the rooms, and I remember an officer storming in and screaming at my Dad to get up, and waking me up in the process. I was terrified. A bunch of strange men in riot gear with big guns storming my home in the middle of the night, how is a 6 year old supposed to understand that? I remember that I had freaked out so bad that I had actually gotten sick. But the sad thing is, that wasn’t even the worst of it. My family was arrested that night for Meth, various other drugs, and a gun that I didn’t even know was there. And I was sent off to my first foster home.
I was sent to live with a lady named Robin and her family. Robin’s Mom was actually a really nice woman, and likely the only reason I survived the place. Robin herself was really abusive, physically and mentally. If she was upset for any reason what so ever, she took it out on me. There were also a set of siblings that lived there too, I don’t remember their names. A brother and sister, both teenagers at the time.
They were far from good people, too. Constantly bullied me, stole my stuff and hid it. Some of which I never got back. But the brother was the worst of it. He raped me, more than once. Robin knew about it too, but didn’t do anything to stop it.
There towards the end, I was able to have weekend visits with my Dad and family. But there was only one person who saw that I wasn’t the same happy-go-lucky kid anymore, my Dad’s cousin. I dont really remember much of my childhood other than that.
At least up until I was roughly 11. My family never really changed. Drug and alcohol use was still a daily occurrence. I ended up being placed in foster care for a second time. I was lucky, that time. Even though I went through 3 different homes, there were all decent. I was in state custody for about 2 to 3 years before I got to come back home.
By that time, my Dad had moved to the family farm, which was closer to the last foster home I had been in. When I got to come home, I moved in there too. Dad had managed to go clean, and the first few years weren’t bad if you ignored the constant fighting between my alcoholic relatives.
We ended up moving into a trailer house a few miles away, but still on family land. Things were alright, for the first little while. But Dad ended up falling back into old habits. I was in denial for some time, most of my high school years, in fact. But I could keep denying his change in behavior. He became emotionally and mentally abusive. It was late junior year that I finally accepted that things were falling back to how they were before.
Over then next few years, my dad treated me more and more like crap. He’d leave me stranded at home for entire weeks, when we lived miles from town and didn’t know any of our nearest neighbors. Who were still a good distance away. He still treated me like a child. Constantly made me feel less than, or that I wasn’t worthy of anything good. If something went wrong, he blamed it on me. He even went as far as to try and convince others of how ‘stupid’ I was. As painful as that was, it was even worse that most everybody turned a blind eye to what was going on, or were in denial about it. The ones that did know were a couple of my cousins, but at the time they had no way of helping.
It was the summer after my 20th birthday that I finally confronted my Dad about the drugs. He went on to say, with a straight face, that I was ‘Lying to make myself feel better about never being home.’ As that summer I was couch surfing between some relatives and my best friends house. After everything that had happened in my life, there aren’t words for how much that one sentence hurt.
It wasn’t long after that several of my relatives turned against me after listening to lies from people outside. People started grouping me in with the ‘druggies’ of the rest of my family. And I began to fear that I’d either be arrested or hurt due to the actions of the others.
It wasn’t long after that I made the biggest change of my life. I packed up and left, moving in with my mother over 1700 miles away from the place I’d lived 21 of my 22 years of life.
To this day, I dont think Dad knows what happened to me back in 2005, or just how much he and the majority of my family back south had hurt me. I’ve never been brave enough to tell them directly, and even now a lot of it still effects my day to day train of thought. But I want to tell my story. And maybe through here they’ll finally learn. I want them to know that even though I love them for the simple fact that they’re blood, I hate them.